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About Bill Shea

Since 2006, I have covered the business of sports, transportation, advertising and marketing, media, and public relations at Crain’s. My journalistic mentors are Vatican newspaper rock critic/gossip columnist Father Guido Sarducci, the late Hunter S. Thompson, the equally dead participatory reporter George Plimpton and skid-row poet laureate Charles Bukowski (who’s also dead). I’m writing a book about my baroque-dada-surreal experiences as the last-string quarterback for an undefeated professional minor-league arena football team. I used to live in downtown Detroit’s Lafayette Park neighborhood, but I crossed 8 Mile, and I drive a Dodge. I hail from Cleveland and remain monogamous to that city’s pro sports teams. My hopeless addiction is buying and reading good books. My man-crush is Teddy Roosevelt. When I write, I listen to The Doors, The Velvet Underground, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Steely Dan. I have a wife, kids, and a polydactyl cat named after Ernest Hemingway’s third wife.

The Sandusky, Ohio, amusement park, which draws a significant number of its 3 million-plus visitors from Michigan, spent a reported $50 million to renovate its flagship in-park hotel in addition to other updates throughout the park.

Remember: Before his five years as athletics director at the University of Michigan ended ignominiously with his resignation last fall, Brandon spent 1999-2010 as CEO of Ann Arbor-based Domino's Pizza Inc.

Crain's has obtained an internal staff memo written by executives at The Detroit News' parent company, New York City-based Digital First Media, that says a sale of the entire newspaper conglomerate is off the table for now.